ACCESS 12, Spring 1998

A long-standing tradition has city planners in the role of creative designers of towns and cities. Perhaps that role is best illustrated in the new town plans of Great Britain with their carefully designed settings for modern life, complete with decent housing, spacious parks, nearby job sites, and high-quality public facilities and services. The basic idea holds that good physical settings make for good living. In that context, one of America’s most eminent sociologists once described city planning as the last stronghold of utopianism.

Over the past few decades, most questions about land use/transportation linkages have dealt with the influence of transportation infrastructure on development patterns. Analysts have examined how highways and mass transit contribute to urban sprawl, how they affect the local balance of jobs and housing, or how they affect population density. There also exists a long, if less traveled, history of viewing these linkages from the opposite direction: examining how land use influences urban travel.

The New Urbanist goal to create pedestrian-friendly transit villages is hard to criticize. Transit villages promise reduced traffic congestion and heightened quality of life. Their formula is simple: Create clusters of houses, shops, jobs, and social services amidst neighborhoods where transit riders and pedestrians outnumber drivers.

Transportation investments and land developments are opposite sides of the same coin. Urban historians and planners have long recognized the power of highway and transit investments to shape metropolitan development patterns. Likewise, transportation planners have long realized the importance of development densities and patterns in shaping the demand for transportation facilities and services. While these relationships may be clear in hindsight, they’re usually cryptic in foresight.

Between 1970 and 1990 the percentage of white workers with central city jobs declined by more than half, from 50 to 20 percent, and the percentage of black workers with central city jobs declined from 61 to 37 percent. The decentralization of residences was even more dramatic. The proportion of white workers living in the central cities of US metropolitan areas declined by 29 percentage points, while the proportion of black workers declined by 42 percentage points. By 1990, only about one out of eight white urban workers was living in a central city.

Home shopping is not a novelty. Our parents may have received milk at the front door, or invited the Avon lady or an encyclopedia salesman to step inside. Nowadays we pick up the phone to order pizza or to buy clothing from catalogs, or we receive weekly deliveries of organic produce. Today’s home shopping orders are usually transmitted by mail or telephone.